HOSPITALITY AND LEISURE FLOORING: Flooring that holds up the experience

Hospitality and leisure covers a lot of ground. An aquarium, a stadium suite, a hotel bar and a gym have almost nothing in common on paper, and a floor specified for one would fail in another. What they share is that each one is delivering an experience to its guests, and the floor has to help carry that experience while standing up to everything the building throws at it. This piece looks at two venues about as different as the sector gets, an aquarium open every day of the year and a matchday restaurant, because the thinking behind both is the same: start from how the space is used, and work back from there.

A good floor keeps you in the story

The Deep is built to make you feel like you are underwater. Visitors move from tropical reefs to Antarctic ice, surrounded by more than 3,500 species, and the whole point is to feel submerged in it. The floor's job in a place like that is to carry that feeling and stay out of the way. The moment a visitor clocks the floor, something has gone wrong. They have been pulled out of the world the venue spent a fortune building.

It works the same way at a stadium. The story there is the occasion, the matchday, the sense of a proper day out and getting dressed up. People have come for something that feels a cut above the everyday, and a tired floor in the hospitality suite quietly chips away at that before anyone has ordered a drink. The floor is part of what holds the day together.

One venue rarely needs one floor

Walk The Deep from the door and you can feel the floor changing its job as you go. Visitors come in off the street, often out of the rain, so the first stretch has to keep its grip under wet feet. From there the route winds down through the levels and areas like the Lagoon of Light to the Endless Ocean and the penguins in the Kingdom of Ice, round tight turns, down ramps, past viewing windows and through underwater tunnels where people stop to watch the sharks drifts by. Talks and artefact handling run every hour through the day, so there are always spots where a crowd gathers and children sit down on the floor to watch. By the restaurant and the gift shop the pace has softened, and the floor softens with it, into a warmer wood-effect that is more about comfort than grip.

And the day does not end at six. The Deep also hires out its spaces in the evenings for corporate events, private dinners and penguin breakfasts, and runs sleepovers where children bed down beside the tanks. The flooring in a building like that is never really off duty. It gets cleaned hard and often, in the gaps between one use and the next, and it has to come up looking right every time. So each finish is chosen for what its patch of the building goes through, the traffic, the spills, the cleaning regime, rather than one product run wall to wall because it was easier to order.

The tricky parts are the ramps, the staircases and the junctions where one finish meets another. They take the most concentrated wear, carry the most slip/trip risk, and they are the places a rushed job shows itself six months on.

The work has to fit around an open venue

Then there is the question of when any of this can happen. The Deep is open to visitors from ten until six every day, and the building often keeps working after that, with functions and sleepovers running into the evening and overnight. So the installation programme could not simply start when the doors shut. The working window moved night to night around whatever the venue had on, and the whole job was phased area by area, outside the busiest holiday weeks, to keep the place safe and open throughout. That was 1,500 square metres over eight weeks, fitted into the hours the building could spare.

The real constraint in that situation is curing time. Subfloor preparation and smoothing compound need long enough to set, and there is no rushing it when your window is a few hours and the first visitors arrive at ten regardless.

The premium end of hospitality runs on the same clock. When the tired carpet in the Circle Restaurant at the MKM Stadium was replaced with herringbone LVT, the work had to fit inside a two-week shutdown between fixtures and functions, and the floor was down and ready in a week. A suite that reopens on time and looking right keeps the venue's calendar moving.

None of this ends when the floor goes down. Leisure & Hospitality flooring takes years of traffic most commercial spaces never see, and it does not arrive evenly. At The Deep that is over 450,000 visitors a year, most of them packed into the school holidays. A stadium suite takes a season's worth of wear across a handful of matchdays. So the choices made at specification, slip rating, wear layer, how it copes with wheeled loads, are really choices about how the floor is holding up in year five.

Every sector asks something different of a floor, and understanding what a sector specifically demands is where the difference between an adequate job and a lasting one gets decided. In hospitality and leisure, that means understanding how the space is really used, whether that is a school holiday crowd tracking rain through the front door or a private dinner two hours after the last visitor left.

The floors Hull Flooring first laid at The Deep went in when the building opened, back in the early 2000s. The renewal, more than twenty years later, was the second time round. Nobody comes to The Deep to look at the floor, and getting it right is what keeps it that way.

You can explore more of our commercial projects across the sector and if you're planning an office fit-out and want to talk through what your spaces need from the floor, we’d love to hear from you.

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